CUNANAN CLAIMS HIS LAST VICTIM

CHICAGO TRIBUNE

Andrew Phillip Cunanan shot himself to death late Wednesday in a house boat in Miami Beach, about the same time he was being spotted by a waitress at a truck stop in north Texas, a grocery bagger in a small town in New Hampshire and a used car salesman in a lot outside Terre Haute, Ind.

During his three-month murder spree, Cunanan, the boy next door turned homicidal monster, grew in the popular mind into the sum of all our criminal fears.

Like the boy next door, he was seen everywhere by conscientious citizens who dutifully called in their sightings to law-enforcement authorities. But in the end, the homicidal monster reached a dead end and, using the same .40 caliber pistol with which he dispatched three of his five victims, ended his own life.

His suicide inspires ambivalence. On one hand, it assures that no one else will become his victim. On the other hand, it means that no one will ever know what it is that sent him on his murderous binge and what relationship, if any, he had with his victims, including Chicago developer Lee Miglin and fashion designer Gianni Versace.

Given the havoc he wreaked, however, the ignorance is a small price to pay for the assurance that Cunanan will kill no more.

It's unlikely Cunanan will ever be romanticized as some outlaws and fugitives of the past have been. It would be hard to romanticize a fellow who tortured a victim to death, slashing his throat with a gardening saw, stabbing him in the chest, crushing his chest and leaving his body wrapped in plastic and brown wrapping paper.

That's what Chicago police say Cunanan did to Miglin, the 72-year-old real estate developer who was found slain May 4 in his Gold Coast home.

By comparison with Miglin's, Cunanan's other murders were merciful. But the last--of Versace, outside the designer's Miami Beach home on July 15--catapulted him to international notoriety. His face was on the cover of national newsmagazines and on literally every national TV broadcast.

Maybe Cunanan figured that, with saturation coverage like that, his cover was blown for sure. So he didn't flee to Texas or New Hampshire or Indiana. He holed up in that houseboat and, when the cops finally surrounded him, the monster consumed himself.